clocks and hearts can stop..

..but time marches on.
I am 34 years, 266 days, and 21 hours old. Give or take a few minutes. ;)
I was born two weeks late, and when they finally convinced me to come on out, I refused to breathe for a bit.
When I was one, I remember standing in my grandparents' livingroom in my snowsuit, looking out at the snow falling through their big window, and waiting for someone to take me out to play.
At two I loved Steppenwolf and Pink Floyd, and I would sit at the kitchen table with a pencil circling every "it" and "the" I could find in the articles and ads in the newspaper.
At three I had two imaginary friends, Dotsy and Pansy, who were as real to me as any of my family. When my sister learned to crawl, she'd make her way over to where I was playing and mess up or knock down whatever I was building (I was often building). I started dragging her as far from me as possible to buy some time to play a bit more in peace, and she'd always come back.
At four my grandmother died, and I remember how sad everyone was. My mom was never the same.
When I was 5, I told my parents that I refused to go trick-or-treating anymore because it was begging. I also figured out that Santa Claus, etc. were lies. I had to keep the secret from my sister for another four or five years.
At six, when I started school, I was completely lost.
Assimilating myself with the world has been very exhausting, and I think I had it all figured out back then. I'm only just recently realizing how little so much of the last thirty years or so has mattered fundamentally. Honestly, if I weren't such a natural optimist, I don't think I would have made it to this exact second in time.
So..what does all that time add up to?
I have a middle-aged friend who thinks their life will end sooner than average. I have a young friend that asked, "How does anyone know when they're middle-aged? How do you know it's the middle?" My dad is close to retirement, and I told him I want him to spend every cent he has living..that when he goes I want nothing left behind but memories. My mom seems to have nine lives, and has only used five of them. She seems afraid to live. My sister is like a cockroach..I don't think even nuclear holocaust could do her in, despite her best efforts. She was born pushing the limit. I've been too careful, and I've had too many close calls in spite of that.
I'm also only just beginning to live in ways. Picking up where that 5-year-old left off. How old am I again? ;)
So far I have very, very few regrets. I'm waiting out the biggest ones, and refusing to add any new ones to the collection. However many lives I have and wherever I am in their time-frames, I've decided that I'm doing pretty well. If I met myself, as I am now, at age 5, I have to think I'd very much like me.

Mystic
by: Sylvia Plath

The air is a mill of hooks----
Questions without answer,
Glittering and drunk as flies
Whose kiss stings unbearably
In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

I remember
The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,
The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun's conflagration, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?

The pill of the Communion tablet,
The walking beside still water? Memory?
Or picking up the bright pieces
Of Christ in the faces of rodents,
The tame flower-nibblers, the ones

Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable-----
The humpback in his small, washed cottage
Under the spokes of the clematis.
Is there no great love, only tenderness?
Does the sea

Remember the walker upon it?
Meaning leaks from the molecules.
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.

The heart has not stopped.
__________

Exactly.